HYDERABAD: A sting operation by The New Indian Express has exposed a venal Village Revenue Officer (VRO), who was working for hand in glove with a middleman to bleed white the State government’s Kalyana Lakshmi scheme beneficiaries.
Posing as a relative of one of the beneficiaries, our staffer nailed a middleman named Balaji by recording his conversation with the beneficiaries seeking a bribe of Rs 10,000.
Their modus operandi is that as soon as the cheques are ready, the VRO would hand them over to Balaji along with the phone numbers of the beneficiaries. Balaji, would in turn, would demand the beneficiaries for payment of Rs 10,000 for depositing the cheque of Rs 1,00,116 in the bank to be credited into the beneficiary’s account.
On Friday, Balaji was seen negotiating with the beneficiaries at Shaikpet mandal revenue office. This newspaper shared the recorded audio clip revealing this corruption with the MRO K Venkat Reddy.
The MRO then summoned the VRO and asked him to produce the cheques since the beneficiaries did not get them yet. The VRO could not show them, since he had already given them to Balaji. When the MRO questioned him further, the VRO admitted giving them to the middleman.
Balaji describes himself as local leader of Uday Nagar in Banjara Hills, Road No 10. After learning about the illegal activity from the audio recording, the MRO lodged a complaint with the Banjara Hills police station against Balaji and also wrote to the district collector for action against the VRO.
Meanwhile, G Raju, father of a girl, said: “We applied for Kalyana Lakshmi assistance and have been waiting for the last nine months. But a week ago, we got a call from Balaji stating that the Kalyana Lakshmi amount had been sanctioned and he asked us to submit photocopies of the necessary documents which we did the next day at the MRO office. After two days, we received another call from Balaji saying that our cheque was with him and we had to pay Rs 10,000 to him to get our cheque deposited in our account,” Raju said.